All Comments on 'Nielsen and T'Vani'

i liked this story being a trekkie *chuckles* but i have found this side of Pon Farr totally fascinating, thank you for posting. i was always curious if the female goes throu it as the male Vulcan does..lol

Donna

It is illogical to assume that species with chemistries as radically different as Humans and Vulcans could produce offspring naturally, and therefore through accidental procreation. I believe it was Carl Sagan who said a human would be more likely to mate successfully with a petunia. For a hybrid like Spock to exist, considerable genetic engineering would be required.

Further, it is illogical to assume a 97% pregnancy rate for Vulcan mating -- given the long lifespan of the Vulcans and the necessity of mating every seven years, such a near-guarantee of offspring would produce a birthrate far above the 2.1 births per mother necessary to maintain population. You'd instead have an utterly unsustainable population explosion. Remember, Vulcan had "an aggressive, colonizing era" but that's over -- thousands of years of more than doubling the population every generation creates an impossible situation -- Vulcan would have looked like Gideon in short order.

@schlock: I am not a Vulcan :-) But if you insist...

Regarding the possibilities of cross-species procreation: there is some evidence in canon that Humans and Vulcans can procreate (yes, I'll admit, weak evidence).

And regarding 97% chance of procreation being too high, I don't think it's unreasonable to assume that this was needed to offset deaths in the Vulcan's violent past, and that they have now found a perfectly logical solution to the problem (I dunno, some anticonceptive like the pill or abortion).

The only real criticism I have (and this shows just how complete my geekdom is, I know!) is that when T'Vani flushed, she would have turned green, not red -- Vulcan blood being copper-based instead of iron. But I thoroughly enjoyed the story... even if it did leave me wanting more!

Please submit more stories of this type. I really enjoyed this.